The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel — A grotesque image of an ogre shooting an arrow into another creature’s rear. A nun plucks penises off a phallus tree. A bizarre hybrid examining someone else’s hindquarters. And rabbits conducting a funeral procession. Medieval society wasn’t all about prayers and plagues. The printing press hadn’t been invented yet and…

Do you think The Kiss is sexually provocative? — By 1897, radical artists in Vienna started disrupting traditional arts and culture. Artists and intellectuals, including Gustav Klimt, architect Otto Wagner, composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud challenged academic art and started associating themselves with progressive art styles like Art Nouveau. This was the rise of…

The transformation to a trillion-dollar company — An illustration created waves in the technology realm in 2011. One reason was that it featured the top tech companies of that period. But the main reason was the illustration of Microsoft, it caught more eyeballs than the rest. A group of pyramidal-shaped organizational hierarchies with one leader at the…

Deconstructing the reasons behind Michelangelo’s “men with breasts” — Michelangelo wrote in one of his poems, “I’m ugly.” He believed he did not meet societal beauty standards. Despite this, he spent his entire life in pursuit of sublime perfection. Michelangelo’s David is indeed the most perfect statue in the world. It exudes the aesthetics of high Renaissance art and…

When Dali lost to Max Ernst — What if I tell that the elephants in Dali’s The Temptation of St Anthony are in stark contrast with the biblical interpretation of “numbers?” The number “one” in the bible represents unity. Dali’s first elephant symbolizes the opposite of that. A woman holding her breasts apart. In the bible, the…

The wildest and weirdest imagination of Dali — 1. The Persistence of Memory (1931) Dreams fascinated Dali. He was the kind of painter who was always on the lookout for newer methods and techniques to put surrealism on paper. In 1930, he developed a ‘paranoic critical method’ while painting The Persistence of Memory. This technique required no…

Genius interpretations otherwise hidden from the naked eye — I don’t usually do this, but here’s the latest video on our YouTube channel. Just like Medium, I’d appreciate your support there too — 1. Creation of Adam by Michelangelo (1508–1512) Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam is a treasure trove that continues to inspire artists and scientists for centuries after his death. Although at first glance this…

Remedios Varo — the lost surrealist — Which artists come to your mind when you hear about the art movement — Surrealism? Of course — the geniuses from Europe — Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. Or perhaps Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. But what if I tell you…

Horror, disturbance, fear, and dread — “A hag or a witch grins ghoulishly over a bowl of food, an evil-looking figure whispers in the ear of an old man, a drowning dog lost in an unidentifiable mass, and the most disturbing out of them is the demonic figure with wide eyes and swallowing the body of…